Pages

Tuesday, 11 December 2012

Christmas Printing!

Seasons Greetings and Happy Holidays Everyone.

I hope you are all having a good end to the year, for me the last few RepRap months have been extremely interesting. Lots of machine testing and calibration, continuing and starting some new developments and printing a lot of presents for people.

More about machines and developments in the new year along with some overdue tutorials I plan to get completed over Christmas. - Have a great time and happy Christmas printing - Rich.

Day 18 had the 3rd different White PLA in this Advent tree, this time it's Pearly White, one of my favorite's

That's it for white now, if I need any more I'm going to have to get creative.

Days 19 & 20 -

Day 19 was a Santa Hat, this is a little tricky to print in one part, and would require support material, I didn't fancy doing that, so I sliced it in half and glues it back together with a drop of superglue.

This one is a really interesting one to slice, you can go for a big nozzle width and get just shells for a very quick printing time, or a smaller fine nozzle and get a lot of tiny infilling slow print but a more filled look.

I also had some interesting differences with two recent Slic3r versions while attempting to slice this model, here is what I was seeing with Version 0.9.1 (my usual version at the moment) and testing out V0.9.5

This was with Slic3r V0.9.1 - 0.42mm nozzle and 0.67mm single wall width, no infill - Slic3r makes a few little mistakes in the model but this GCODE prints well and quickly, the middle section is just loose enough to pop it out if you feel like it.

GCODE file is 200KB

This was with identical settings as above but with Slic3r V0.9.5 - This actually makes for a nice looking print but it has lots of tiny points of infill and a lot of extruder moves - it should also NOT be doing any infill, all filling and solid layers were turned off.

GCODE file is 250KB

This version is back to Slic3r 0.9.1 but with 0.42mm nozzle and 0.47mm single wall width, 20% infill, you really do end up with a dual ring around the snowflake, a nice print and quite quick.

GCODE file is 400KB

To test the infill problem of Slicer V0.9.5 I used 0.42mm nozzle and 0.47mm single wall width (as above) but had 0% infill and 0 top and bottom layers, this should give a hollow object, as you can see above it made a nice and filled star. This GCODE, 2.5MB and has some nasty high speed infills causing resonance in my printer and a massive number of extruder reversals, not one to print!

The photo hanging on the tree was with a slightly tweaked single wall size of 0.5mm GCODE was about 1.5MB Using Slic3r V0.9.5 - I never did manage to get a really nice print out of V0.9.1 but as Slic3r has moved on quite a few revisions now I'll take another go with the next version as I type this it's V 0.9.7

It also makes for an impressive Russian doll style stacking box set if you scale them to fit into each other.

Over the last few months I have printed more than I can count of these, the smallest being about 7mm and the biggest so far printed on a Rostock printer at about 186mm wide.

The RepRap presentation at Cheltenham Geeks in November was great, lots of people turned up and we had quite an evening discussing all sorts of 3D printing and additive technologies. Thank you all for a great evening, can't wait to do it again. - I'll have the presentation and notes available soon (sorry for the delay)

About Me

Richard Horne (RichRap)
is an Electronics Engineer, Product Designer, Salesman, and Problem Solver
working in a wide range of industries and applications, across many platforms
and technologies for the last 20 years.